§ Statement of Purpose

The View from 1776 presents a framework to understand present-day issues from the viewpoint of the colonists who fought for American independence in 1776 and wrote the Constitution in 1787. Knowing and preserving those understandings, what might be called the unwritten constitution of our nation, is vital to preserving constitutional government. Without them, the bare words of the Constitution are just a Rorschach ink-blot that politicians, educators, and judges can interpret to mean anything they wish.

"We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams, to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.

Two things struck Tocqueville forcibly as he traveled across the United States. Everywhere there was a strong attachment to the equality conferred by political liberty, and everywhere there was an unwavering devotion to Christianity. The two, he concluded, were inseparably connected.

“On my arrival in the United States,” he wrote, “the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more I perceived the great political consequences resulting from this new state of things. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.”

Tocqueville would have said that present-day American liberals’ advocacy of libertine license represents all the worst elements of French political life, the very sources of France’s social and political instability. French revolutionaries had destroyed the monarchy and the Catholic Church, making the nation a secular and socialist republic. It was the absence of religious moral restraint that had permitted the slaughter of more than 70,000 people in the name of perfecting humanity. This same secular irreligion was to murder more than twenty million people in Soviet Russia, National Socialist Germany, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, Cambodia, and other socialistic countries.

Americans strongly opposed establishment of an official national church, like the Church of England. But, Tocqueville says, “[Christianity] contributed powerfully to the establishment of a republic and a democracy in public affairs; and from the beginning, politics and religion contracted an alliance which has never [as of 1831] been dissolved.”

“The sects that exist in the United States are innumerable. They all differ in respect to the worship which is due to the Creator; but they all agree in respect to the duties which are due from man to man; all sects preach the same moral law in the name of God.”

“In the United States religion exercises but little influence upon the laws and upon the details of public opinion; but it directs the customs of the community, and, by regulating domestic life, it regulates the state. Thus, while the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving, and forbids them to commit, what is rash and unjust. Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of it.”

“When [people in France] attack religious opinions, they obey the dictates of their passions and not of their interests. Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.”

Would you have fought against tyranny in 1776? Was not declaring independence from tyranny, “Biblically-based?” Read the grievances in the Declaration and see how many are again prevalent today. I am disturbed by how a Christian could consider allowing the Obamanation to continue! Will we be better off with Romney or Obama? Until someone is on the ballot that meets all Biblically-based requirements are not Christians committed to working and voting against the most evil choice? Are not Christians to continue to spiritually and politically confront unrighteousness and challenge Christian complacency? This is not the same America when candidates were Christians and most voters were Christians.

As I’m visiting grandchildren, does it not give credence and appreciation for vehemently opposing the reelection of a Marxist? We have been given a choice between Obama and Romney as a result of the complacency of Christians. As a citizen of both the Kingdom of God and the United States can a Christian justify encouraging me to not vote for Romney, which I contend is the same as a vote for Obama? Was King David perfect? Under which President will more babies be aborted? Under which President will progressive politically correct Marxism gain more momentum? Can I count on Christians to explain to my children and grandchildren that Election 2012 is a “test” and not a step in reversing the damage Obama and his Democrat/Marxists/RINOs have perpetrated on this REPUBLIC the last 4 years. Until “Christians” elect men of Biblical moral virtue then as Christians we will always fail the “test.”

Charles Finney wrote: “The time has come for Christians to vote for honest men, and take consistent ground in politics or the Lord will curse them…Politics are a part of a religion in such a country as this, and Christians must do their duty to their country as a part of their duty to God.” ...“God will bless or curse this nation according to the course Christians take in politics.”

Jesus is the King of the Kingdom of God and not running for President (and neither is Allen West). Therefore, since the only One Who is perfect is not running, than someone who is imperfect must be. Plus, how many candidates, even Christian, will satisfy all Christians? Christian voters must decide, in this present day climate of prevalent progressive left-wing culture which candidates are likely to do less harm to the Republic and adhere more to Biblical Righteousness.

Yes it is disturbing we have to choose between a Marxist and a RINO. Christians in Marxachusetts consistently have to choose between Marxists or RINOs, as we did when Romney ran for Governor and Brown for Senator. Yes I am beside myself with Romney after he did NOTHING and to uphold the Massachusetts Constitution and prevent same-sex marriage from being made in court and again when he violated the liberty that comes from God with Romneycare.

However, it took decades to degenerate into this moral decline and America will not be restored overnight as Christians sit on the sidelines refusing to confront “politics and religion,” as the Marxist media continues to deceive complacent American voters. As long as preachers only preach John 3:16 and not what Jesus said in the same breath through verse 21, or 1 Timothy 2 and not 2 Timothy 4 as well America will continue to decline.

“A vote is like a rifle: its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.” Theodore Roosevelt

Gary Kelly’s web site is EarsToHear.net He is the author of Lessons of The Holy Spirit: A Guide for Entering the Kingdom of God and Discover Why It Pleased God to Hide His Kingdom from the Wise.

Culture And Survival Of The Constitution

“Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.”

So wrote John Jay in Federalist No. 2, wherein he describes Americans as a “band of brethren united to each other by the strongest ties.”

The United States was founded on the Judeo-Christian ethic that historically was the substance of Western civilization. Ours was a specifically English conception of individual morality and individual responsibility that, only in England and its North American colonies, had produced a government of laws, not men, a government in which even the king is subject to the statutes of the land and to a higher moral law.

This conception of government necessitates a citizenry self-regulated by moral precepts that are preserved and taught by spiritual religion. The government must similarly be restrained by the limits of natural law, which say that no legitimate government may infringe any individual’s rights to life, liberty, and private property. Both religion and natural law, and their relation to human nature, are part of God’s creation.

No society can survive without a consensus about right and wrong, about what constitutes moral conduct. That consensus is the unwritten constitution of society, the content that gives meaning to a written constitution, the meat on the bones of the structure of government. Without that consensus there can be only disparate special-interest groups; such is the multi-cultural jumble into which the United States has blundered since the late 1960s.

Opposing our original conception of government is the liberal jihad, driven by the ideology of socialism, sometimes called The Religion of Humanity or secular humanism. This religion was formalized in the 1789 French Revolution, the same year that our Constitution was ratified.

Socialism is a secular religion. Like Islamic suicide bombers, liberals are so firmly persuaded that their cause is right, good, and just that they are prepared to go to any lengths necessary to destroy the Judeo-Christian ethic of individual morality and replace it with a rigidly regulated National-State collectivism, of which Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were extreme examples.

The religion of socialism is being taught unconstitutionally, at your expense, in public schools and colleges receiving Federal aid. Teaching the religious doctrine of socialism as “scientific fact” amounts to making liberal-progressive-socialism the unconstitutionally established religion of the United States. The way, and it necessarily will be laborious, to stop the liberal jihad is to force schools to present both sides of the story, traditionalist, as well as liberal-progressive. Publicly funded schools now teach only the amoral, secular materialism of the socialist religion. Schools no longer present true versions of American history and of our original ideas of civic virtue and personal morality that are historically the substance of Western civilization. Penetrating the shield of socialist teachers’ unions and the politicians whom they help elect is a very long-term project, but a vital one.

The largest volume of immigration in the nation’s history, both legal and illegal, coupled with liberals’ relentless efforts to destroy America’s original traditions of individual morality, leaves us with no core values and a diminishing will to defend ourselves against foreign enemies.

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

A Federal Republic If We Can Keep It

Delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 were explicit in rejecting any opening for consolidation of too much power in the hands of any person or agency of the government. The Constitution’s chief bulwark against such mischief is the preservation of states’ rights that had existed before the Constitution. Hence, ours is a Federal republic comprised of states exercising significant powers that are denied to the national government. It is not a democracy that is inevitably vulnerable to mob rule that makes the protection of individual political liberties under the Bill of Rights a mockery.

The electoral college is the Constitution’s method for preventing a tyrant from seizing unwarranted power by fomenting mob rule (see Obama’s class warfare political campaign) with the collusion of the so-called mainstream media, who represent less than half the nation’s voters, the liberal-progressive-socialist radicals.

At least every four years commentators declare that this is an outmoded procedure that should be replaced by a straight popular vote. Polls of citizens generally show considerable support for doing so. Yet, in the 1787-89 period during which the ratification of the Constitution was hotly debated across the land, the Electoral provisions for selecting the President were almost the only part of the Constitution not fiercely objected to by one group or another (see Hamilton in Federalist No. 68). Most citizens at the time appeared to be fully satisfied with the indirect election method of the Constitution.

It was desirable that the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided. This end will be answered by committing the right of making it, not to any preestablished body, but to men chosen by the people for the special purpose, and at the particular conjuncture.

It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.

It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder… The choice of SEVERAL, to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than the choice of ONE who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes. And as the electors, chosen in each State, are to assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place.

In Federalist No. 39, Madison described the nature of ratifying the Constitution, as well as of electing the President and members of Congress:

... it appears, on one hand, that the Constitution is to be founded on the assent and ratification of the people of America, given by deputies elected for the special purpose; but, on the other, that this assent and ratification is to be given by the people, not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong. It is to be the assent and ratification of the several States, derived from the supreme authority in each State, the authority of the people themselves. The act, therefore, establishing the Constitution, will not be a NATIONAL, but a FEDERAL act.

In short, the Constitution sought to avoid precisely our present-day process, in which simplistic propaganda barrages are aimed at warping the opinions of citizens who know little about the issues facing the nation and have almost no understanding of the alternatives and trade-offs available to the government. Instead of choosing leading citizens in each state as Electors who can give careful, rational consideration to the qualifications of potential presidential candidates, we rely on public opinion blatantly manipulated by TV advertising.

Technically we still elect independent electors in each state, but they are almost always bound beforehand to vote for one of the two principal party candidates. Some states have removed even that decision from the electors, mandating that all electoral college votes be given to whoever has the greatest number of popular votes across the nation. Another problem arises from the population growth of major cities on each coast and in the Mid-West. If the President were elected entirely by popular vote, politicians might concentrate time and money influencing opinions of selected large-city dwellers, whose interests differ from those of most of the remainder of the country, and simply ignore voters everywhere else. Winning the big-city vote could provide a majority of the whole. But a statistical majority is a tricky thing. As with a river having an average depth of three inches, there may still be holes deep enough for one to drown in.

George Washington Could Not Tell A Lie

Vladimir Lenin once said, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” In the electronic age, the left has hammered this theory home harder than ‘ol Vlad could have ever imagined.

Every day for two weeks, Team Obama and their media cronies repeatedly told the story of the anti-Muslim video inciting a riot in Benghazi causing the death of our Libyan ambassador and three other Americans. The problem for the administration was that no amount of spin could alter the facts known by millions of people. What became self-evident to everyone was that the Administration, from Barack Obama on down, was lying. People had to wonder if it couldn’t tell the truth about this matter, what else was it lying about?

In 2008, people voted with their hearts that America could be more inclusive than it had ever been. Many voted for Obama because they wanted to be able to vote for the first black man elected to the presidency. While this inclusiveness is an honorable American attribute, Barack Obama has been playing us all for fools ever since.

Obama promised to be a post-racial president. He promised to be a uniter, not a divider. He promised to cut the deficit and then he doubled it. He rammed through a healthcare bill that took over one-sixth of the economy, without a single Republican vote in Congress. And now, he is up for reelection on the worst presidential record imaginable.

Obama’s Libya debacle includes not only four dead people, but an horrendously failed Middle East policy, an attempted cover up that is fooling no one, and bold face lies in a presidential debate. Candy Crowley runs interference for Obama while moderating, and then the mainstream media declares Obama the debate winner. For two weeks, he blamed his failure on a video that no one has seen.

None of this seemed to interest the New York Times or CNN in the days that followed. What would have been a feeding frenzy had George Bush been in office is mostly ignored. The MSM is in the tank for Obama and are complicit in his lies. They are covering for the Obama campaign by ignoring some of the worst presidential failures in history. It is a deception and a cover-up of the highest order.

Obama’s dismal vision is leading nowhere. He has divided us more than ever. In fact, the country is coming apart and is now on the verge of financial collapse. Meanwhile, Obama distracts us with Big Bird.

There is no limit to how low he will stoop. To say he says things that are not true is an understatement. The President is a deceiver and a liar. He cannot be trusted. Richard Nixon was forced to resign because he lied to the American people and could no longer be trusted. At least no one died in the Watergate crisis.

Mitt Romney is finally starting to articulate what should have been said about the Obama presidency long ago. Obama’s list of failure is long: a failed economy, impending financial collapse, trillion dollar deficits, high unemployment, ObamaCare, apologizing for American exceptionalism, giving guns to drug lords, failed Middle East policies, not supporting Israel, destroying domestic oil drilling and coal mining, endless government expansion, and so on.

If we fail to elect Mitt Romney, then we deserve all the pain and misery that will follow in the second term of Barack Obama. With only days to go until the election, there is no time to waste. We must do our part to turn out this dishonest and destructive man from office.

This will be a turnout election. With only small percentage of voters still undecided, it comes down to the ground game. That means it is about us at the street level. If you are not already engaged in the process, you need to be active in neighborhood walks, phone banking, sign waving, fund raising, poll watching, and so on. We must do what we can to ensure our side turns out to vote.

It is time for “we the people” to step up and remove this charlatan from office. It is now or never. We all need to be involved.

Perhaps the most consequential intellectual work of the period was 1962’ s The Other America: Poverty in the United States, which became required reading for the Kennedy administration’s New Frontiersmen. The author was Michael Harrington, an influential liberal and the chairman and principal spokesman for the American Socialist Party…

Mr. Harrington’s solution to so-called structural poverty was to re-impose feudalism via a lot more government spending, forever, and a raft of new welfare agencies to provide income, housing, clothing, medical treatment, and spiritual uplift to the ‘invisible’ one-third of America. Prescribing the standard liberal-progressive-socialist nostrums, Harrington declared,

“In order to do this, there is a need for planning… What is needed is that the society make use of its knowledge in a rational and systematic way. Of course, states and cities are incapable of doing this; ... only the Federal Government has the power to abolish poverty… as a place for coordination, for planning, and the establishment of national standards.”

Michael Harrington’s 1968 Toward a Democratic Left: A Radical Program for a New Majority expressed the sense of the Great Society paradigm.

“Even in a society based on private economic power, the Government can be an agency of social, rather than corporate, purpose… This does not require a fundamental transformation of the system. It does, however, mean that the society will democratically plan “uneconomic” allocations of significant resources… Under such conditions it would be possible to realize full— and meaningful— employment for all those ready and able to work. Going beyond the quantities of the New Deal, the economy could be stimulated by promoting the affluence of the public sector rather than by tax cuts, and in the process millions of creative jobs can be designed to better the nation’s education, health, leisure, and the like. Within twenty years such a policy of social investments should end all poverty, eradicate the slums and erode the economic basis of racism. And those people who are unable to work could be provided with a guaranteed annual income instead of shoddy, uncoordinated and inadequate welfare payments… The very character of modern technology, [Harvard economist John] Galbraith says, renders the old market mechanisms obsolete. In these circumstances planning is obligatory. The state must manage the economy in order to guarantee sufficient purchasing power to buy the products of the industrial system.”

Now, more than forty years later, it is possible to review the actual results of the Great Society and of Mr. Harrington’s prescription. “Promoting the affluence of the public sector” as a means of stimulating the economy meant simply putting more people on the public payrolls. There is no evidence that this produced “millions of creative jobs” or did anything to eradicate poverty (or racism, if one is to believe black spokesmen like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton) within the twenty years of Mr. Harrington’s expectations.

Must Be The Tea Party

Knee-jerk liberal-progressive media, whenever acts of violence occur, blame them on the Tea Party. Presumably, those threatening to assassinate Mitt Romney are sensitive, caring souls who are being driven to retribution by the thought of their savior vacating the White House before completing his socialistic redistribution schemes.

Quote Of The Day

Romney tried his darnedest to bring everything back to the economy and Obama seemed to say in every answer, “So what we need to do in the Middle East is talk more about how rubbish my opponent is.” It’s almost lucky that Obama isn’t running unopposed in this election because then he’d have nothing to run on at all.